My Three Lives

At some point, I suppose, all of us wonder just exactly why we were born in a particular place and at a particular time. What events and circumstances came together to result in our being planted where we first found ourselves? It was for me, a good time and place.

My mother, a small and very beautiful woman, had immigrated to America at age seven . Ester was a vibrant, adventurous sort who found her way from a small mountain town in northern Italy to a country which seemed to offer opportunity and excitement. She was one of six children who had lost their beloved father when Ester was only eight years of age. Ester was sent away to a convent school in Rovereto, a town near the closest large city, Trento. It was a typical convent school of that era. The thought of a convent school in the late eighteen hundreds, conjures up bleak images of a life devoted to the study and execution of religious practices and not much else. Like the reminiscent scenes portrayed in Dickens' stories, I can only imagine that it was excellent ground for developing some basic character traits, patient endurance and a desire to explore and discover what was beyond the mountains where she had been born and raised. These qualities were to motivate Ester for the rest of her life. The family had kept the local post office in their home and the comings and goings of the townspeople gave her the opportunity to learn social skills at a very young age. Her father had been an architectural engineer, schooled at the university in Innsbruck, Austria, so he was able to provide for his family quite well.. The household was always first to acquire any new invention available and when Antonio provided his wife with the first sewing machine in the town, it was looked on by the superstitious townspeople as something inhabited by the devil! Ester's mentality could never abide such irrational fallacies and she sought reluctantly, to change her venue.

It was during this time that I met my first dancing partner, Arthur Bourbon.. He asked to be allowed to observe the classes. After he had watched my class, he showed me his professional photos and asked if I might be interested in auditioning to determine if I would make a suitable partner for him. He was of medium height, blond and slender. The dance team of Bourbon and Bain was very well known. He was Bourbon and his partner of ten years, Chrissy Bain, had met with a serious accident and could no longer perform. He was about twelve years older than I but he had one of those perpetually juvenile faces that defied age then, and for many years to come. Most performers enter show business with the experience of having performed minor roles, but he was suggesting that I take on the role of principal as his partner. Opportunity, yes, wisdom, perhaps not. I was quite accustomed to my world and I was not at all sure I was ready. I was still a teenager with some rather capricious interests. Just a few weeks before, my classmates and I had taken a series of classes at the studio of a well known performer and teacher, Paul Haakon. We had been so taken with him, his talent and personality, that we were determined to have a souvenir. One late evening, we deftly removed the name plate from his front door. The trophy was more of a treasure than we had dreamed of! This performer was billed as "One who soared above the guests at the Waldorf Astoria's cabaret, dancing with unexcelled perfection"- the same Paul Haakon whose name plate we now had in our possession! Some had devotion to Frank Sinatra who was then performing for the gangs of bobby socked teenagers at the Paramount theater several blocks away. But, our undying devotion was to the famous dancers we worked so hard to emulate. When I proudly showed the black and gold name plate to my mother, she was appalled and ordered me to return it immediately!

Exterminating service, which in Florida is considered one of life's necessities, fell into the category of luxury in the novitiate. We began to categorize spiders as those with bones and those without bones. The brown housekeeper spider, a good 8 to 10 inches from one fuzzy end to the other, was one which fell into the "with bones" category. They would appear suddenly from nowhere and we would begin swatting wildly until someone would discern that it was "the kind that eats the others" and we would desist. Before we came to the knowledge that "housekeepers spiders" were desirable, I had an experience with one. It came skittering across the floor of the lavy one morning and all that was within my reach was a large rubber plunger. I grabbed it and deftly captured the beast. The plunger stood in the middle of the lavy floor for a whole day. I made a sign: "do not remove." It was the only alternative to killing the creature but I didn't know how to proceed from there. Silence in the lavy was strictly enforced. The novices came and went and wondered if we had sprung a leak or a well, as we skirted the object beside its sign in the center of the tiled floor. Eventually, the spider was freed by the mistress of novices who made a quick exit when it headed in her direction!

Summer nights brought blessed relief from the day's heat. With lights out, the dormitory cubicle curtains could be opened and a cool breeze from the Indian River would blow through bringing with it the soothing sweet scents of orange blossom and jasmine. The world seemed to be asleep, but not so our friends and constant companions, the palmetto bugs. The stiffly starched headpieces we wore were placed on the night stands. They had been rendered almost unbendable by heavy applications of Argo starch. Bugs eat starch. They don't care if it is found in a kitchen cabinet or in headpieces in night stands. The chomping was indeed a strange lullaby!

One of us finally devised a way to store the whole headdress intact. The coronet, which surrounded the head except for one's face, could be unpinned at the back and the whole thing could be slid off without taking it apart.

The Montessori teaching materials along with the demonstrations of their use begins an enduring interest in math and a desire to learn more and more. I confess that I had always avoided math; it was an enigma to me. When I was in my senior year in high school it was discovered that I did not have sufficient math credits to graduate, so I was dropped into a freshman algebra class. Slow torture! My interests lay elsewhere; my dance career was beginning to take shape, my work at Lord and Taylor brought me new friends. Academics, particularly math, held no intrigue for me. Later on, the world of numbers caught up with me once again. In order to graduate from college, I found that I again lacked the necessary credits. So, I enrolled in a general math class taught by a compassionate retired army colonel who assured the class that no one would fail the course. We struggled to learn about venn diagrams, basic algebra, the rudiments of geometry and how to determine standard deviation. We so appreciated our teacher that on the final day of class the students presented him with a cake decorated with the formula for standard deviation!